The second floor of the community center had been turned into an "interview room."
White folding table, a pot of coffee, a stack of forms, a fire escape route pinned on the wall. Outside, the hills that had burned were sprouting patches of new green, streaked like a half-erased painting.
The interviewer was a woman in her fifties with short silver hair and thin-framed glasses. She glanced at the papers on the table, then looked up.
"Harris/Cole household?"
Melissa's heart tightened — that hybrid last name they'd chosen was being spoken out loud for the first time.
Albert stepped forward. "Yes, that's us."
The four of them took seats at the table. The kids sat straighter than they ever did in class.
The woman looked through their documents, then at the photo. Two kids laughing a little too hard, two adults behind them standing stiffly, trying their best to laugh along.
"How would you describe your family?" she asked, without preamble.
The question hit harder than any numbers on a form.
Melissa's first instinct was to say, "It's complicated," but she swallowed it. She glanced at the others, then said instead:
"After the fire, four people who never planned to live together got squeezed into one truck, one shelter room, and eventually this apartment."
Albert picked up: "We checked the 'family' box on the shelter form. Then somehow dinners, school runs, blackout forts, and not-letting-the-soup-boil-over turned that check mark into something… less pretend."
The woman paused, eyes moving from face to face.
"You know," she said, "there are a lot of families applying for long-term leases. Couples who've been married for decades. Three-generation households. Some people have rock-solid jobs, savings, completely clean records."
At that, William's shoulders visibly tensed.
"So what about us?" he blurted. "What do we have?"
Melissa started to reach for his arm, but the woman lifted a hand to stop her.
"You can answer that," she said gently. "What do you think you have?"
The room went quiet.
Then Maya spoke, very softly. "We have… two adults who keep showing up."
All eyes turned to her.
"The night of the fire, I thought Mom wouldn't come back," she said, gripping the edge of her chair. "Then she did. On the fire drill day, I thought Albert would run ahead, but he stopped on the stairs to count if we were all there."
She searched her nine-year-old vocabulary. "If home is a place, then it needs two adults who don't walk out first."
William added, "We also have a pot of soup. It doesn't always taste great, but there's always someone adding something to it."
Albert couldn't help laughing. "Thank you for your honesty."
The interviewer smiled too, with a tired kind of warmth. "I've seen families with perfect paperwork who don't speak at the dinner table," she said. "And 'complete parents' on forms, where one person is doing all the work."
She closed the folder. "For long-term leases, we do have to look at income, work history, credit scores. But we also look at something else—whether things that feel like 'home' are actually happening in that apartment."
Melissa held her breath for the inevitable "but."
"However," the woman continued, "long-term leases mean stability. Right now, your income structure is, frankly, fragile."
She pulled out a single sheet and slid it toward them. "If you can submit a clearer work and care plan within the next month, we can prioritize your unit. In other words—you have some time to show us you're planning to keep this home going."
Albert looked at the blanks on the page: work hours, estimated income, emergency contacts, long-term care arrangements.
"Compared to others," he asked quietly, "are we good enough?"
The woman didn't answer directly. She pointed instead at the family photo. "That question you just asked—that was you, asking yourself," she said. "Not us."
She looked at the kids again. "From where I sit, what I care about is whether three months from now, six months from now, next year, I'll still see these two kids coming home to someone standing at their door."
By the time they left the room, there was no clear "yes" or "no," only that form and its instructions.
Outside, the rain had stopped. Puddles reflected the four of them, shadows pressed close but still showing a sliver of wary distance.
"Are we good enough compared to them?" William asked again on the way home.
This time, Melissa didn't rush to answer. "If one day, some other kid asked you that about their family," she said, "what would you say?"
William thought. "I'd say… let's eat first, then answer."
Albert burst out laughing. "All right. Let's go home and eat, then figure out that form."
He glanced up at the bit of blue showing through the clouds and quietly told himself—every step this next month needed them not to drift apart.
And that sheet of paper sat in his mind like a small road sign, reminding him: if they wanted to stay, they had to start planning forward together.